Zatanna's 13 now, but she first heard that line when she was 9; Jennifer's Body was the movie that Hydra played for her in her cell, when they weren't cutting her open and calling her a miracle. She didn't get it at first. She was 9 and her parents were dead and the dark scared her. A tiny window slotted by iron bars hung dauntingly overhead, and when the sun rose, seeping scarlet beams slanted through, red as blood. She was 9 and her parents were dead and her body hurt and her heart hurt and she was scared of the dark.
Khoroshen'kaya devochka, Strucker had cooed when the experiments were bad, when they hurt so much she couldn't move. Gently wiping her lanky, sweat-matted hair from her eyes. His hand were withered with sin. His voice that of the devil. Pretty little girl, he'd called her. Like that had ever mattered. This was her girlhood and they were killing her with it.
That pretty little girl was rotting inside. Look further than that mesmerizing skin deep and you'd find nothing but festering flesh. She knows that what she is now isn't quite a girl. Not any longer. She is a child and a mannequin and death.
Hell is a teenage girl.
Zatanna's 13, but she carries a primordial rage, and she would've shaken her fist at God himself to commit acts of heresy in the name hedonism, all to kill Strucker. Eaten his heart like Jennifer. Held a blade to his jugular and worked, in agony, to cut deeper. She could've strangled him softly. Hands gentle as rain.
After smothering the last burning embers of Hydra, the Avengers hasn't chosen to extinguish him, too. No, they decided to give him a trial.
And yet he's dead, anyways. His chest was torn open as the sun set upon his small holding cell.
So now Zatanna's painting her nails a pretty pink. Wanda had packed her an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and then Zatanna and the Maximoff's were free from Hydra.
They hadn't gone very far. An hour's walk down the mountainside is the capital city of Sokovia, riddled with poverty, decimated by violence, war-torn, in shambles from soldiers that had marched on it barely 7 years ago. Everyone here is a refugee. Looming overtop, on the distant, scraggly mountainside, is Hydra's last standing fortitude, not unlike an evil knights castle. All black stone with towers and slit windows, relentlessly hanging over them.
